Roundup: Rackspace's Cloud Acquisitions

Rackspace社の昨今の買収に関して、業界からの反応。

Amazon Web Serviceに対する対抗策、という見方が強い中、これによって価格競争と品質（SLA）向上につながるだろう、という見方をしているものが多く、総じてPositiveである、といえる。

There was some interesting commentary around the blogosphere on Rackspace's acqusition of Jungledisk and Slicehost to accelerate the rollout of its cloud computing services. Here's some of the analysis:

• Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm calls Rackspace's acquisitions "a move aimed at boosting its Mosso cloud offerings in order to step up competition with Amazon's Web Services. But whether or not Rackspace can successfully transition from being a hosting provider to a provider of a truly on-demand cloud offering remains to be seen."
• Does Rackspace want to transition? Not so long as customers are split between the two formats. "Rackspace has the opportunity to combine the best of both worlds, bringing cloud and traditional hosting together," CTO John Engates tells Information Week.
• Gartner analyst Lydia Leong says Rackspace's announcement "signals an intent to be much more aggressive in the cloud space than I think most people were expecting."
• Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch says the Rackspace expansion is good news for developers. "Amazon has been the dominant force in this space for some time, and competition will only decrease prices and (hopefully) lead to an arms race in features, stability, and performance," he writes.

Rackspace's deal with Limelight

Rackspace社、Cloud Computing事業への本格展開を図る中で、Limelight社とのパートナーシップが発表されている。

Limelight社はCDNサービスを提供するベンダーで、Rackspace社との協業で、Rackspace社のCloud Computing事業であるMosso上でCDNサービスを提供するすることになると想定されている。 これはAmazon Web Serviceが提供を開始したCDNサービスに対抗しよう、というもの。

CDNを提供すると、規模の大きいインタネット事業をサポートできるようになるため、事業規模の拡大に大きく寄与する、と考えられる。

Rackspace's deal with Limelight

Rackspace announced yesterday, as part of a general unveiling of its cloud strategy, a new partnership with Limelight Networks.

Under the new partnership, customers of Rackspace's Cloud Files (formerly CloudFS) service — essentially, a competitor to Amazon S3 — will be able to choose to publish and deliver their files via Limelight's CDN. Essentially, this will place Rackspace/Limelight in direct competition with Amazon's forthcoming S3 CDN.

CDN delivery won't cost Cloud Files customers any more than Rackspace's normal bandwidth costs for Cloud Files. Currently, that's $0.22/GB for the first 5 TB, scaling down to $0.15/GB for volumes above 50 TB. Amazon S3, by comparison, is $0.17/GB for the first 10 TB, down to $0.10/GB for volumes over 150 TB; we don't yet know what its CDN upcharge, if any, will be. As another reference point, Internap resold via SoftLayer is $0.20/GB, so we can probably take that as a reasonable benchmark for the base entry cost of CDN services sold without any commit.

It's a reasonably safe bet that Limelight's CDN is going to deliver better performance than Amazon's S3 CDN, given its broader footprint and peering relationships, so the usual question of, "What's the business value of performance?" will apply.

It's a smart move on Rackspace's part, and an easy way into a CDN upsell strategy for its regular base of hosting customers, too. And it's a good way for Limelight to pre-emptively compete against the Amazon S3 CDN.